TOP

Texture Operators, also known as TOPs, are image operators that provide real-time, GPU-based compositing and image manipulation. All calculations for TOPs are performed on the system's GPU. TOPs can be used for preparing textures, compositing streams images and movies, building control panel elements, and almost any other image task you might have. TOPs support many formats, including floating-point image formats for working with high-dynamic range (HDR) images.

All renders and composites occur offscreen with TOPs. Data can be scaled to any resolution, limited only by the amount of graphics RAM and the maximum resolution of the graphics card.

TOP Flags

The lower right corner contains only 2 flags, the TOP’s Display Flag and Viewer Active Flag. Turning on the display flag displays the TOP as a background in the current Network Pane. Turning on multiple TOP Display Flags will display a tiled sequence of multiple TOP outputs as the background of the network pane.

TOP Viewers

A gray checkerboard background will be displayed in images where an alpha channel is present. This can be turned off by opening Preferences in the Edit menu. In preferences you can choose to use checkerboard or black as you alpha background.

Use LMB to move the image around. Use MMB to zoom in and out of the image. Re-center the image by using the home shortcut "h".

Clicking the RMB will open the viewer options menu. Keyboard shortcuts are listed beside each entry in the menu.

Home - Re-centers and scales the image to fit in the viewer.

Display Pixel Values - Displays pixel information over the image. The Timeline should be playing forward for the values to properly update.

The following is displayed:

cursor uv coordinates

cursor xy pixel coordinates

RGB values 0-255

RGB values 0-1

Display Field Guide - Displays a 24x24 field guide over the image. The guide also displays the action safe zone and title safe zone for the image.